The word of the day is windy. Tonight was so windy we could barely open. From the night report by TO Mauricio Martinez:
3.- 23:40 UT High winds for MagAO, Closed. /MMa
4.- 01:56 UT Opened. /MMa
5.- 02:18 UT High winds for MagAO, Closed. /MMa
6.- 03:59 UT Opened, SH Conemode enabled, with better sky condition, better EL SH performed better. /MMa
7.- 06:08 UT High winds for MagAO, Closed. /MMa
And what does that look like? 5am High Winds Clay
We kept trying to peek through the wind anyway: Here you can see all the “sucker troughs” that kept us awake and hopeful throughout the night
Well after all the work last week and this week to travel here, tear Clio apart, put Clio back together again — we finally have some pretty images on Clio. This is the new Brackett Gamma filter: Our new Brackett Gamma filter has a nice 74-mas PSF and no obvious inherent filter ghosts. It’s pretty, but it sure hurt with sleeplessness to get it that pretty!
And some pretty plots of the pumpdown and cooldown last week: Clio pump down — Minutes vs. pressure on 3 places on the pump — the final steep drop in pressure is when I started cooling.
Clio cool down — Minutes vs. inner and outer dewar temperature.
But it takes a lot of work to get Clio that pretty, and it takes its toll: Pretty Hurts: A representative picture.
I’ve been this sleepy too: Jared, Sebastien, Matt, Mauricio… and the representative clean room bird.
Meanwhile, Laird attached more Arizona gear to the Nas before he left today: Laird is licensed to drive MagAO.
Gilles reporting in for the daily MagAO blog. Word of the day is “sleepy”.
After being blasted by winds in the previous nights, this night was surprisingly calm (*COUGH*andcloudy*COUGH*).
This gave the team the opportunity to relax a bit and work on some maintenance and documentation that needed to be done.
Jared, Katie & Laird are slowly recovering from literally working around the clock to get the system on-sky.
To illustrate how the team looked in the last days I managed to snap a picture of the zeroth member of the MagAO team at the cleanroom building. The zeroth member of the MagAO team Vizzy.
This is the final night for Leiden so I just want to say that Matt and I feel very priviliged to be part of the team for the last few days. It was a lot of fun working with you and we’ve seen very exciting images taken with the new vAPP coronagraphs!
Hats off to you for your efforts in the previous weeks to pull this off. Hope you get clear skies during the rest of the run ! Also kudos to LCO for such a pleasant stay during my first time in the Southern hemisphere. I’ll be back!
The title of today’s song is of course very dear to our hearts but the lyrics are probably written by somebody as equally sleep-deprived as us.
…hello, hello……is this thing switched on? Great! Here we go…
This is Matt Kenworthy, and I’ve been let loose given the reins of the MagAO blog for the night. The word of the night is “plate”, and apparently I’ve been saying “holy guacamole!” a lot.
My graduate student, Gilles Otten, and I are here for three engineering nights with the MagAO team testing three grating vector APP coronagraphs that we have had manufactured. These APP coronagraphs enhance the sensitivity of direct imaging cameras such as Clio2.
Getting the APPs installed in Clio was an epic task which the MagAO team rose to without a single complaint (that we heard…) and last night we saw the first light through the first APP – and it works!
Tonight, after a fight with high wind, we’ve been doing more engineering tests for the A1 APP and then we tried the 360 degree vAPP – which worked as well. Amazing stuff.
On this, my (hopefully, fingers crossed) last full night as TO I have the honor to do the daily log entry. Plenty of rules to adhere to, thought (can I suggest next time we only use live performances, performed on site? We could do a gregorian chant on the domes, that would be pretty cool).
Can’t really tell what happened during the day, although it seems that finally the full AO team is on the unnatural night shift (based on the vibes here at the control room at 4 AM). Good for you guys! Only 4 and some weeks to go!
The night started pretty good, on sky very early on, on our first official science night. Of course, after 2 (3) great Engineering nights Murphy had to apply, and a network failure had us on our heads. And double bad luck: once fixed, wind speed was too high to safely open. Sorry, that’s the one thing I can’t fix. That and the damned plates.
Better play safe. Hold on to your hats!
Thank a LOT for the opportunity of watching through the eyepiece. I was flabbergasted, really. See you next week. Oh, and a bit late, but: May the 4th be with you!
Welcome APOD and Sky and Telescope readers. This post was written while MagAO was mounted on the Clay 6.5 m telescope, and we post daily updates throughout the run on the main page. You can also find out about some of our scientific results using the In The News and Results pages.
You can also read about our eyepiece observations in a post by Tom Beal at the Arizona Daily Star.
On our first night on-sky in 2015A, our infrared camera Clio wasn’t quite ready to mount on the telescope. We also needed to test operating the AO system with a different camera, since there are several new instrument concepts in the works (Clio’s entrance window is the dichroic which sends light to the Pyramid and VisAO). The result of these fortunate circumstances is that we mounted the eyepiece for the very first time.
Laird presents the MagAO eyepiece. It is mounted where Clio normally goes.
The night started out poorly. It was cloudy, a guider communications cable failed deep inside the telescope, and one of VisAO’s hard drives failed.
Our first night started out cloudy. (Picture by Yuri Beletsky, click for larger image)
The telescope staff went to work on the cable, and Jared tore apart the VisAO electronics. Meanwhile, Laird was doing some last minute alignment checks on the eyepiece. At around midnight, all the problems were fixed and the sky magically began to clear.
Once we opened, we immediately pointed at alpha Centauri A which is a very bright star and so makes a good alignment target. Working out on the platform in near freezing temperatures, we moved the MagAO Pyramid wavefront sensor around until it was aligned to the star with the eyepiece dichroic.
Eyepiece alignment was done on the platform. At left is a cellphone image of alpha Cen A&B imaged on a card through the eyepiece. At right is the simultaneous image on the VisAO camera (on a laptop screen on the platform). These are open-loop images (before we turned on the AO).
Then, on the first try, we closed the loop at 1000 Hz controlling 300 modes.
Proof that the loop was closed while we were observing.
At that point, we were observing the alpha Centauri system at the diffraction limit of a 6.5 meter telescope! Luckily the moon was out, giving Yuri Beletsky plenty of light to document the whole thing.
Laird Close, the MagAO PI, observes alpha Cen at the diffraction limit of the 6.5 meter Clay telescope. The inset shows an image recorded with VisAO, MagAO’s visible wavelength science camera, at nearly the same wavelength (i’). Reports from all observers indicate that it looks just like this through the eyepiece! (Photo by Yuri Beletsky, click for larger image)
The eyepiece had a very red filter installed, passing wavelengths longer than 685 nm. This means the sharpest details in the image were as small as 22 milli-arcseconds. We’re pretty sure that this is the highest angular resolution image ever formed on a human retina. We compared what we saw to images recorded on the VisAO science camera at nearly the same wavelength, and it was very gratifying to see the similarities.
Katie tried her hand at drawing the image. You can see the 22-milliarcsecond core of A, the control radius around A, the chromatically elongated speckles, some atmospheric dispersion is evident, and you can see that anisoplanatism is affecting the image of B.Jared, Katie, and Laird pose next to the eyepiece. Katie is holding The Book. (Photo by Yuri Beletsky, click for bigger version)
During the night, 9 people looked through the eyepiece. These astronomers are the inaugural members of an exclusive club: “L’Ordine degli Astronomi al Limite di Diffrazione” (The Order of Astronomers at the Limit of Diffraction). In this moonlit timelapse you can see most of them take their turn.
Special thanks to Yuri Beletsky for documenting this great night.
